The Geometric Abstraction Movement emerged in Europe in the early 1900’s. From this point, Mondrian’s Neo-Plasticism and Malevitch’s Suprematism provided the inspiration for their successors. While Itten and Albers were concerned with the rules of form and color, Moholy-Nagy pioneered the development of kinetic three-dimensional works. Afterwards, Herbin and Vasarely created an abstract pictorial alphabet, which predates the Kinetic and Op-Art Movements of the 1950’s and 1960’s. In the 1950’s, Jesus Raphaël Soto and Carlos Cruz-Diez came to Paris from Latin America, guided by their desire to paint in an abstract, constructive manner and became involved in the creation and development of the Optical and Kinetic movements.

Born in 1936 in the Andes-Cordilleras, Dario Perez-Flores studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Valencia and the Central University of Venezuela. Under the influence of Soto and Cruz-Diez, Pérez-Flores joined the Optical Movement in 1970. During the 1980’s the Venezuelan artist began to add colors to his sequential paintings, naming the series “Prochromatique.“ These works create a subtle optical vibration that attracts the spectator towards their center, as if moved by a visual and mysterious emotion. Because of the use of verticals in relief against a linear background, Perez Flores’ paintings are similar to those of Soto, Agam and Cruz-Diez, yet distinguish them by the vibrant use of the color spectrum in producing subtle rainbow-like effects.

Goethe stated, “Color should be the concept of nature for the visual sense of the eye…. Within the sequence of the essential phenomenon of nature, color has a very high rank; though being assigned to a simple sphere, it displays itself to an incontestable richness…“ For Perez-Flores color acts foremost as a vehicle for creativity, perception, spirit and system. The series of diagonal, dynamic-chromatic works, created in the early 1990’s, showed these particular aspects of the artist’s color theory, especially the function of color as a subtle means to the realization of the phenomenon of space linked to the kinetic dynamism of the work.

In his recent work Perez-Flores tries to overcome his mathematical structures with a pictorial manipulation of space offering a system of formal plasticity. The paintings exhibit a simulated movement, which is achieved through combining colorful stripes painted on panel with rods that are sequentially suspended parallel to the surface of the painting. The spectator actually initiates the subtle movements of the works through their own introspection and perception of various coloristic values.